"Ka30P" wrote in message
...
All right, all you people in the SE, with all your hurricanes - we, in the
PNW,
are pleased to announce one of our many volcanoes, Mt. St. Helen's, is now
producing lava!
http://tinyurl.com/43yn3
You can see the volcano here ~
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

kathy - who remembers Spirit Lake before it became
a mud pond.

I'm a geologist, and have been monitoring the volcano remotely (i.e., online)
since the first rumble started in September. This eruption and the Parkfield
earthquake in california lasty month have kept us all very busy and drooling
over the mountain of data these events have produced. Needless to say, the
current eruption will go down as the most closely watched, and the most
thoroughly studied volcanic event ever in the continental U.S. It has confirmed
many ideas on how these eruptions occur while startling us by showing clearly
how much more there is to discover. For those who like nice pictures in
deference to hard data, here are a few links to some fascinating high resolution
images of the eruption:

http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/Images/MSH04/

The following image compares a visual image of the erupting lava with an
infrared view that shows the heat of the magma:

http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Imgs/Jpg/M...-13-04_med.jpg

For those who are interested in more technical aspects, here is a link to the
available near-real-time seismographs of the region:

http://www.pnsn.org/WEBICORDER/GREEN/welcome.html

To use this page, scroll down and locate a particular sesimograph station (for
instance, Cedar Flats, at Mt. St. Helens) and click on the latest link for the
latest seismograph of tremor activity at that station.

For those who want even more technical information, try the following link,
which will take you to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, and lots of
information on Mt. St. Helens and other volcanoes in the region:

http://www.pnsn.org/welcome.html

Just for fun, take a look at this site if you want to see what really large
eruptions have done in the past compared to the 1980 Mt St Helens eruption:

http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/...esia/toba.html

And this last link gives plots of earthquake locations on Mt St Helens,
time-depth plots, and tremor magnitude over time.

http://www.geophys.washington.edu/SE...lensep_mo.html

I can answer most any questions you may have, so feel free to ask. Enjoy.